# Where to start — finding your unique story

- **Episode:** [115](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/115.md) (2024-07-15)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** employer-brand, strategy, storytelling
- **Time:** 22:11–28:29 (start 1331s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/115?t=1331](https://truthliesandwork.com/115?t=1331)

---

[22:11] Al Elliott: Now, David just said that you can start with very little investment. So, how exactly do we get started, and what does a good employer brand look like?
[22:19] David Thompson: Where does it start is, let's understand the story. We need our unique story to go to market with. So, we will research that. We'll talk to your people. We will pull together what we call our employer value proposition framework. Here's our 3 or 4 stories we're really happy with. That process takes about 4 or 5 weeks. We then shape that into a visual look and feel. that's going to look great and correct for the market, the tone of voice that's going to work on your career site and your social media. That takes another couple of weeks. We then look at kind of creating the main assets you're going to need to go to market, which will be your career site, your social media pages, your Glassdoor pages. So, you know, that process takes probably, you know, 2 months to do all of that process. Then it's a question of taking it to market, and the best route to market that you have is your own people. So, we spend a lot of time focusing on advocacy, getting your own employees to share the content that you're producing, share that story, and produce their own content, which kind of reflects our story. Your own people are free of charge. They are connected to the right people. more people like them. And as we said before, people trust their voices 3 times more than they do a corporate voice. So we very much focus on advocacy, using your own people to go out there and tell their story. That also has a very powerful internal effect as well. If your own people are kind of saying, here's my story, your employees are seeing these stories as well, it just creates a feel-good factor, you know. So yeah, advocacy is kind of the starting point. Then beyond that, we look at other methods of reaching the people we want to reach, so social media, paid advertising, things like exhibitions, careers fairs, etc. Lots and lots of different ways to reach those audiences, but it essentially all starts with the story. If you haven't got a unique differentiating story, there's no point in going to market. And one of the biggest mistakes we see in employer branding is organizations not having that focus story. So they come to me, right, we need to do something, okay? We need to go to market with some kind of employer branding. And they'll start telling lots of different stories. Hey, here's us at Macmillan Cake Day. Here's us wearing our Christmas jumpers. Here's a training session that we did the other week. But ultimately, they're telling too many different stories, and people can't remember what they're supposed to remember. So it's very important that you just Nail down those 1 or 2, 3 core stories and tell them repeatedly. Tell them in different ways, with different people, but keep telling the same story over and over again. That's how you get people to remember why you're different. It's a well-crafted marketing strategy transposed into the world of people recruitment and retention, into a world that was purely transactional before, But we're now introducing the theories and practices of marketing to give an edge, to give an emotional impact and an edge to help you get the best and keep the best people
[25:31] Al Elliott: Am I understanding it that the aim of this kind of process is that by the end of the work you've done, you can go and ask anyone in the organization from the janitor to the CEO, and they should be giving you the same answer? Is that the aim of it?
[25:45] David Thompson: Absolutely, yes. So I ask The CEO, why do you think it's different here and a great place to work? But ultimately, we don't just want to depend on his view. So when we are constructing our story, we research through the whole organization. So we speak to as many people as we can through focus groups, through online surveys, and we're going to consolidate the views of everybody to reach what we call our employer value proposition. Essentially, that's our kind of 3 or 4 stories where you're going to go, that's us, guys. That's what we're about. That's what makes us different. And anybody in the organization should be able to look at that and go, yeah, I see that. Some bits I feel more strongly about than others. I feel more strongly about our purpose than I do about our technological innovation. But all of it is true and authentic. So you can take that to market with confidence. and say, okay, that's our story, we all believe in it. What you don't want to do is kind of invent it from the top and then have people elsewhere in the business going, I don't recognize that at all. That will have the exact opposite effect of what you're looking for. It will cause disengagement, it will cause people to feel alienated, it will just cause people to burst out laughing at your own pack of lies. So authenticity is absolutely key, and the And the route to that is through research. You can get a sense of what people think it's like to work for you by looking at things like Glassdoor and Indeed. If you, you know, that'll give you an indication of what people are saying about you, your own employees are saying about you, and you'll know pretty quickly, you know, if it's positive, negative. I think the truth is most organizations, If you were to go up to a person in the street and say, what's it like to work for Company X who are down the road? Vast majority of people say, I have no idea. So most organizations, when we say, you know, what's your employer brand? They don't currently have much of an employer brand, is the truth. They may have one or two kind of reviews on Glassdoor. But that's about it. Most people don't know what it's like to go and work for an organization. So, the other way a company can kind of figure out what people are saying about them is go and talk to your own people, go talk to your recruiters. So, your recruiters are talking to candidates every day, and they will be asking, you know, questions about, what do you know about us? What do you think about us? So, that's a really good source of data as well